via explodingdog.com
Bacon-wrapped scallops
According to nuggetboy, the little buggers were rather hard to wrap in bacon. We wrapped most of the ones we defrosted in bacon, and tossed 4 other unwrapped ones to fry in the bacon fat with their more dressed-up brethren. >.>
Verdict! Uh. Scallops fried in bacon fat are better than scallops wrapped in bacon. O.o It's troo!
See, the scallops fried in bacon absorb a massive amount of bacon fat into their scallopy fibres, resulting in a bacon scallop explosion of taste when chewed. Oddly enough, wrapping the scallops in bacon seems to protect the scallop from... the bacon fat - resulting in scallops that are less bacony than the plain fat-fried ones, but with nice contrasting textures from scallopy goodness and bacony crispiness.
Lemon Sorbet Wannabe
I saw a recipe on the interwebs somewhere that said, make sorbet! It's easy! combine ice, sugar, juice, freeze in a flattish shallow container, and WHACK IT HARD REPEATEDLY WITH A FORK (and replace in the freezer each time) until it becomes sorbet. -_- What they neglected to mention was the exact technique for whacking with a fork until it becomes fine and grainy. Right now, it's at the crushed ice stage. I'm beginning to wonder if it would be better with a blender - but unfortunately, I don't have one. The recipe says whacking it repeatedly until it submits and becomes a sorbet is the way it's traditionally done... so I guess I'll just keep beating it up over the week.
It does taste awfully nice, even though in typical nugget fashion, I neither used the exact same ingredients, nor followed any measurements. XD What I used was enough water for a shallow soup dish, with a heaped tablespoon of manuka honey, and 3 lemons. It's very potently lemony, and quite refreshing, but if we do this again, I think I'll put 2 tablespoons of honey in rather than one. Nuggetboy likes his desserts sweeter, I do like honey, and right now, while my nuggetly senses can detect the honey quite distinctly, he can't taste it at all.
Updates on sorbet beating to follow!
via fxcuisine.com
via fxcuisine.com
The noodles must be 1.6mm wide. 'How do you achieve such regularity?' I asked. 'Easy. Just place your knife at a 1.5° angle and it will push back the guiding board just enough so that the next noodle will be exactly 1.6mm'. Right. There is nothing to tell the chef when he reaches 1.5° so I guess the pupils must get their money's worth if they learn to do it right in 30 days!
This weekend's bacon science!
Steak cut up in decent-sized chunks (mini sausage sized really...) and marinaded in teriyaki marinade + chinese cooking wine overnight. Then wrapped in bacon and pan-fried!
This turned out really good, though due to nuggetboy being paranoid about crisping the bacon, the cow was more done than I liked. Of course, I like my cows practically still moving so... XD Nuggetboy likes his well-done though, so good on that front.
Next try with this shall be chicken! At least the done-ness will be agreeable to us both.
Caramelised Maple Syrup Pancakes Fried in Bacon Fat!
These were great, but they didn't really need the bacon fat. Yes, inoes! How can it be!
Well it turns out that all the maple syrup the pancakes absorbed while soaking in syrup overnight gushed out when we plopped them in the pan. This had the unforeseen result of caramelising the maple syrup all over the outside of the pancakes, along with infusing them with mapley goodness. The downside is, the caramelising maple syrup basically forced all the baconny fatty goodness away from the pancackles, so we couldn't really taste any bacon at all.
Verdict: Great, but might as well be fried with butter.
Creampuffs Fried in Bacon Fat
Pleasant, but better as the frozen creampuffs they were. Turned out like little poofballs of crispy milk.
Sperm Jellies...
Erm... well - we found these in a dessert at a chinese restaurant and just had to bring them home. >.> They're jellies. That look like spermies. That is all.
We have been through this before. For me, it begins in 1981.
“You’re ruining games, you know.”
My Dungeons & Dragons DM said this to me when I started working at Sir-tech Software on the Wizardry series of games. “Games aren’t meant to be played like that, not this game.” He had heard about Wizardry, how I could create 6 characters and take them on an Apple II adventure, without interacting with any other human beings. It wasn’t social like D&D was; it wasn’t even particularly intellectually challenging. The entire game had maybe three puzzles in it, and an absolutely endless series of button mashes – Fight, Fight, Fight, Parry, Parry, Parry. It would have been a clickfest, but we didn’t have mice on our machines back then.
I remember people writing letter after letter after letter when they found the Lesser Demons and Greater Demons that haunted the lower levels of the maze. They called us evil and said our games promoted Satanism. They didn’t, and we didn’t, but it was a reflection of the time we were in.
It was a challenging time. We stood together, you and me, because we loved games.
I remember when graphics started to replace text, and we worried that the game’s deeper meaning would be lost, and that soon, games would be nothing more than meaningless images incapable of transmitting any deep type of play, never mind the feared complete loss of story. I remember lamenting the loss of the text parser and absolutely railing against keyword conversations because, to me, they dumbed down the whole game to the level of toast. I remember when cutscenes first appeared in games and we committed the cardinal sin, taking the game out of the hands of the player, because we wanted to show something cool and wow them, even if they just sat there waiting for it to pass.
I remember these things, you remember these things, because we loved games.
I love this post, but it makes me feel... old. :(
Absolutely amazing rendering stuff just using WebGL.
Don't leave it running and wander off to lunch though... made me hard reboot my poor Mac for the first time in years. XD Had some really scary looking graphics card issues.
It’s actually remarkable to see that sites like Google, Live, Twitter, LinkedIn, AOL, Adobe and Myspace (to name just a few) send out a 1150 byte icon.
Given that Google has tried everything to skim down its main page (including removing </body> and </html> tags, it’s odd they didn’t save the 239 bytes by creating a PNG file and providing that PNG to all non-IE clients (multiply it by 100 million or so hits/day and you get a nice 23TBytes…).
Whoa, I never even considered this. O.o